>>9913507Fight Club, basically from the moment I saw it. It's about meaning in one's life and the strength of the individual to persevere against an insidiously cold world, in short.
>>9913578Donnie Darko is about a kid living nowhere special in a life that is mediocre to slightly bad. It's not starving African child tier but it's nothing really to brag about. Life is dull and unexciting and the one good thing comes along by chance. Nobody understands what they should be doing with themselves.
Nobody, not even his own family, understands him. He accepts his death because he sees he has nothing to live for; his sacrifice was not to him a sacrifice, because saving anyone at that point was worthless. There was no point continuing in that reality when the opportunity to quit existed. The film ends with him laughing about how absurd, ridiculous, unfair, and incomprehensible (especially to anyone but himself) the predicament was---he had to die, for no particular reason, in order to save people who neither care about him nor who make the world a better place.
It's a very nihilistic film. Viewers who detract the film by declaring the lack of meaning in it simply don't recognize that his subtle suffering is the meaning, and the apparent lack of a punchy morality wrap-up providing proper closure is in fact the statement that things are not alright and will not get better. It is telling the audience that it's messed up. Most people do not want to hear this, do not comprehend it, and so will never accept it---that is why it seems to them to be non-meaning.
Everyone who complains about the Director's Cut just sees Donnie Darko as a flick, as mere entertainment. It's true that's it's not as thickly substantial as it should be, but it is by no means devoid of substance. The real deeper meaning will go over most audiences' heads, as they typically take for granted no real nihilism being in their films; so any that employing it so highly leave them oblivious and clueless.
